Quotes from Donna Tartt

It's the place where reality strikes the ideal, where a joke becomes serious and anything serious is a joke. The magic point where every idea and its opposite are equally true.

Because: if our secrets define us, as opposed to the face we show the world: then the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am. And it's there: in my notebooks, every page, even though it's not.

And if what she'd wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she'd known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.

I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew...

A month or two before, I would have been appalled at the idea of any murder at all. But that Sunday afternoon, as I actually stood watching one, it seemed the easiest thing in the world. How quickly he fell; how soon it was over.

Understand, by saying 'God,' I am merely using 'God' as reference to long-term pattern we can't decipher.

does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end -- and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy? To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint.

then realized she wasn't there. Or—she was there and she wasn't. Part of her was there, but it was invisible. The invisible part was the important part. This was something I had never understood before. But when I tried to say this out loud the words came out in a muddle and I realized with a cold slap that I was wrong. Both parts had to be together. You couldn't have one part without the other.

His warmth, which seemed to presume upon some happy old intimacy we did not share, had thrown me into awkwardness.

It was as if I'd suffered a chemical change of the spirit: as if the acid balance of my psyche had shifted and leached the life out of me in aspects impossible to repair, or reverse, like a frond of living coral hardened to bone.

Talvolta, nel caso di un incidente, quando l'evento è troppo improvviso e strano per essere compreso, il surreale prende il sopravvento. Le azioni procedono al rallentatore, come in un sogno, fotogramma per fotogramma; il movimento di una mano, una frase, durano un'eternità.

By his own choice, he had so little contact with the outside world that he frequently considered the commonplace to be bizarre: an automatic-teller machine, for instance, or some new peculiarity in the supermarket—cereal shaped like vampires, or unrefrigerated yogurt sold in pop-top cans.

Mais, vrai, j'ai trop pleuré! Les aubes sont navrantes.

And I'm hoping there's some larger truth about suffering here, or at least my understanding of it -- although I've come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand.

I would be less frightened of death (not just my own death but Welty's death, Andy's death, Death in general) if I thought a familiar person came to meet us at the door

Even if life is great--keep it to yourself. You don't want to tempt the devil.

She was the missing kingdom, the unbruised part of myself I'd lost with my mother.

He had a theory that pupils learned better in a pleasant, non-scholastic atmosphere; and that luxurious hothouse of a room, flowers everywhere in the dead of winter, was some sort of Platonic microcosm of what he thought a schoolroom should be. (Work? he said to me once, astonished, when I referred to our classroom activities as such. Do you really think that what we do is work? What else should I call it?

While to a certain extent Milton is right-the mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heaven of Hall and so forth-it is nonetheless clear that Plano was modeled less on Paradise than that other, more dolorous city.

It's not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn't understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out. A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help.

Because: if our secret defines us, as opposed to the face we show the world: then the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am. And it's there: in my notebooks, every page, even though it's not. Dream and magic, magic and delirium. The Unified Field Theory. A secret about a secret.

What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way?

Es una locura, pero sería feliz mirando los mismos seis cuadros el resto de mi vida. No se me ocurre una forma mejor de enloquecer.

And what does a person with such a romantic temperament seek in the study of the classics? He asked this as if, having had the good fortune to catch such a rare bird as myself, he was anxious to extract my opinion while I was still captive in his office. 'If by romantic you mean solitary and introspective,' I said, 'I think romantics are frequently the best classicists.' He laughed. 'The great romantics are often failed classicists. But that's beside the point, isn't it?